Codenamed Longhorn, it was Microsoft's most ambitious operating-system development effort in over a decade, entailing both an extensive redesign and a major overhaul of the application programming interface (API), the underlying set of services the OS provides to programmes. Despite the significant changes, though, Longhorn was far from a complete rewrite; it built on the Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 code bases as well as the .NET framework − Microsoft claimed that maintaining compatibility with existing applications was a priority.
As evidence of this commitment, the 2003 Professional
Developers' Conference − Microsoft's annual confab for third-party
Windows developers − included a demonstration of Longhorn running
VisiCalc, the classic DOS-based spreadsheet application from 1981.
Longhorn's goals were numerous: make Windows more productive and
engaging, improve security and reliability, and provide support for a
new generation of rich, media-aware applications. That was just to name a
few. To get a taste of what Longhorn had to offer, a sample team of professionals installed and
worked with build 4074, which was released at Microsoft's Windows
Hardware Engineering Conference in the following year's spring. Microsoft
developers had also been quizzed to unveil some of the inside track on what's still to come.
While it was too early to pass judgment on Longhorn, which wasn't
expected to ship until 2006 or 2007, the users were hopeful about the direction
Microsoft was taking with its new OS. The new 3D user interface
was thought to be useful and fun. Users were optimistic about the prospects of the WinFS file
system, an ambitious and appealing effort to better organise,
categorize, and expose the masses of material on modern hard drives.
(And it was hoped that Microsoft had learned from its missteps with the object
file system in the Cairo project and its other efforts to recast the
file system.) It was expected that developers would appreciate the steps
Microsoft was taking to simplify the Windows programming model and to
make it easier to write graphically rich applications.
Perhaps most of all, weary of combating exploits and applying
hotfixes, we were looking forward to the increased security and
reliability that Longhorn aimed to offer from day one.
